Towards a Lightweight Approach for Modding Serious Educational Games: Assisting Novice Designers

Serious educational games (SEGs) are a growing segment of the education community’s pedagogical toolbox. Effectively creating such games remains challenging, as teachers and industry trainers are content experts; typically they are not game designers with the theoretical knowledge and practical experience needed to create a quality SEG. Here, a lightweight approach to interactively explore and modify existing SEGs is introduced, a toll that can be broadly adopted by educators for pedagogically sound SEGs. Novice game designers can rapidly explore the educational and traditional elements of a game, with a stress on tracking the SEG learning objectives, as well as allowing for reviewing and altering a variety of graphic and audio game elements

A Domain-Specific Modeling approach for a simulation-driven validation of gamified learning environments Case study about teaching the mimicry of emotions to children with autism

Game elements are rarely explicit when designing serious games or gamified learning activities. We think that the overall design, including instructional design aspects and gamification elements, should be validate by involved experts in the earlier stage of the general design & develop process. We tackle this challenge by proposing a Domain-specific Modeling orientation to our proposals: a metamodeling formalism to capture the gamified instructional design model, and a specific validation process involving domain experts. The validation includes a static verification , by using this formalism to model concrete learning sessions based on concrete informations from real situations described by experts, and a dynamic verification, by developing a simplified simulator for 'execut-ing' the learning sessions scenarios with experts. This propositions are part of the EmoTED research project about a learning application, the mimicry of emotions, for children with ASD. It aims at reinforce face-to-face teaching sessions with therapists by training sessions at home with the supervision of the children's parents. This case-study will ground our proposals and their experimentations

A hybrid e-learning framework: Process-based, semantically-enriched and service-oriented

Despite the recent innovations in e-Learning, much development is needed to ensure better learning experience for everyone and bridge the research gap in the current state of the art e-Learning artefacts. Contemporary e-learning artefacts possess various limitations as follows. First, they offer inadequate variations of adaptivity, since their recommendations are limited to e-learning resources, peers or communities. Second, they are often overwhelmed with technology at the expense of proper pedagogy and learning theories underpinning e-learning practices. Third, they do not comprehensively capture the e-learning experiences as their focus shifts to e-learning activities instead of e-learning processes. In reality, learning is a complex process that includes various activities and interactions between different roles to achieve certain gaols in a continuously evolving environment. Fourth, they tend more towards legacy systems and lack the agility and flexibility in their structure and design. To respond to the above limitations, this research aims at investigating the effectiveness of combining three advanced technologies (i.e., Business Process Modelling and Enactment, Semantics and Service Oriented Computing – SOC–) with learning pedagogy in order to enhance the e-learner experience. The key design artefact of this research is the development of the HeLPS e-Learning Framework – Hybrid e-Learning Framework that is Process-based, Semantically-enriched and Service Oriented-enabled. In this framework, a generic e-learning process has been developed bottom-up based on surveying a wide range of e-learning models (i.e., practical artefacts) and their underpinning pedagogies/concepts (i.e., theories); and then forming a generic e-learning process. Furthermore, an e-Learning Meta-Model has been developed in order to capture the semantics of e-learning domain and its processes. Such processes have been formally modelled and dynamically enacted using a service-oriented enabled architecture. This framework has been evaluated using a concern-based evaluation employing both static and dynamic approaches. The HeLPS e-Learning Framework along with its components have been evaluated by applying a data-driven approach and artificially-constructed case study to check its effectiveness in capturing the semantics, enriching e-learning processes and deriving services that can enhance the e-learner experience. Results revealed the effectiveness of combining the above-mentioned technologies in order to enhance the e-learner experience. Also, further research directions have been suggested.This research contributes to enhancing the e-learner experience by making the e-learning artefacts driven by pedagogy and informed by the latest technologies. One major novel contribution of this research is the introduction of a layered architectural framework (i.e., HeLPS) that combines business process modelling and enactment, semantics and SOC together. Another novel contribution is adopting the process-based approach in e-learning domain through: identifying these processes and developing a generic business process model from a set of related e-learning business process models that have the same goals and associated objectives. A third key contribution is the development of the e-Learning Meta-Model, which captures a high-abstract view of learning domain and encapsulates various domain rules using the Semantic Web Rule Language. Additional contribution is promoting the utilisation of Service-Orientation in e-learning through developing a semantically-enriched approach to identify and discover web services from e-learning business process models. Fifth, e-Learner Experience Model (eLEM) and e-Learning Capability Maturity Model (eLCMM) have been developed, where the former aims at identifying and quantifying the e-learner experience and the latter represents a well-defined evolutionary plateau towards achieving a mature e-learning process from a technological perspective. Both models have been combined with a new developed data-driven Validation and Verification Model to develop a Concern-based Evaluation Approach for e-Learning artefacts, which is considered as another contribution

Share.TEC Final Project Report

This report provides an overview of Share.TEC, a three-year project co-funded by the EC that supports access to, exchange and re-use of digital resources and practitioner experiences within Teacher Education at European level. The document comprises a number of sections that can either be read consecutively, to gain the full picture of the project and its outcomes, or in combinations so as to grasp particular aspects, how these were approached and what results were achieved. Section 2 describes the project\u27s overall objectives in terms of both its technological ambitions and its wider mission as part of the overall educational landscape. Section 3 gives brief profiles of the partners who made up the Share.TEC consortium. In Section 4 the results and achievements of the project are reported. This includes a description of the portal and its features; the system architecture, tools and services; the models underpinning the Share.TEC system; and the approach taken to its multilingual dimension. Section 5 addresses the question of Share.TEC\u27s target users and their needs. It describes the strategies and means employed for incorporating the user perspective, and for ensuring that the project direction was in line with users\u27 concerns so that the resulting portal responds suitably to the actual requirements of the people it\u27s designed for. Section 6 examines the critical aspect of underlying content. In keeping with the Share.TEC mission, the focus is largely on aggregated metadata records that describe digital resources for TE and which are expressed in terms defined by the project for TE purposes. Section 7 reports the activities undertaken in the project and thus narrates the processes that unfolded through the project lifetime as the consortium pursued its objectives and generated its outcomes. Section 8 describes the effort to establish the Share.TEC portal within its natural ecosystem. It looks at the global strategy for maximising impact both at regional/national level and internationally, and analyses the conditions and prospects for continuity and growth. Readers interested in the technical/technological dimension of Share.TEC (the system, portal, models, metadata, etc.) are likely to find Sections 4, 5 and 6 to be the ones closest to their concerns. Conversely, those whose interests lie elsewhere could simply consult Section 4.1 to get an idea of the portal from the user\u27s viewpoint and go to Sections 2, 3, 7 and 8 for a vision of the project and how Share.TEC is positioned in the panorama of digital resources and Teacher Education

SUMMARY OF PROCEEDINGS OF THE “LINKING THE MIDDLE AGES” WORKSHOP (MAY 11-12, 2015) at the University of Texas at Austin

Summary of Proceedings of Workshop on the possible application(s) of Linked Open Data to Medieval Studies.In May 2015 the CLIR/Mellon Foundation Postdoctoral Fellows in Medieval Data Curation convened a two-day workshop on the sharing and publishing of linked open data (LOD). Funded by a CLIR/Mellon microgrant, the workshop brought together librarians, technologists, and scholars to exchange ideas on the challenges posed to medievalists in sharing data on digital platforms. More than thirty experts took part in the workshop, which was held at The University of Texas at Austin on May 11-12, 2015. Participants presented their work in linked open data operational sites and took part in discussions about the obstacles and opportunities of LOD in three areas: research, teaching, and publication. This paper documents the possibilities and problems of applying LOD in medieval studies. It focuses specifically on its application to the field’s data, which requires medievalists to work together with librarians and technologists, and considers a technical infrastructure that can maintain and proliferate this type of collaborative work.Council on Library and Information Resources, The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, University of Texas Libraries, University of Texas at AustinUT Librarie

Game design : c2learn project deliverable no. D4.1.2

This document offers the final game design deliverable of the C2Learn project. It builds on the method and game patterns identified in the first game design deliverable (D4.1.1) and fuses input from work on the C2Learn theory (WP2), learning design (WP2), C2Learn computational tools (WP3 and WP4) and the C2Learn pedagogical practice (WP5). The document introduces the role of game and play activities within the C2Learn environment (identified as C2Space), describes the design process followed and concludes with the descriptions of a number of detailed digital game descriptions (4 game activities) and playful activities (2 play activities) and their links to the overarching C2Learn gameful social environment (C2Space). Both the C2Learn theory and pedagogical practice is realized through the palette of games and tools described herein. Furthermore, the available C2Learn technology is supported under each game and digital tool designed.peer-reviewe